So, you’re in charge of your company or team’s Team Foundation Server. Wish it was easier to manage, administer, extend? Well, here are a few utilities that I highly recommend looking at. I’ve recently had need to rebuild my laptop and upgrade my local TFS environment to TFS 2012 Update 1. This gave me cause to enumerate some of the utilities I like ......

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Getting the balance right for when and how many team projects to create has always been a bit of a balance. On large initiatives, there are often teams who work toward a common system. These teams often have quite a bit of autonomy, but need to roll up to some higher level initiative. In TFS 2010, people were often tempted to create separate Team Projects ......

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I found this week’s Windows Phone 8 event interesting. Not just because it looks like some fantastic new features in the new OS but because of the wait for release. If I were a Nokia shareholder (which I am not) I’d be very unhappy with MS announcing that Windows Phone 8 will NOT work with current hardware. So, there are some very nice Lumia devices ......

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Last week I attended Build Windows conference and have been spending a considerable amount of time thinking how things have changed for developers. The initial reaction from most people was “Oh My God” with all the focus on WinRT and Metro UI and little mention of .Net, Silverlight, WPF, etc. You could almost feel the equal parts panic and excitement ......

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The August ‘11 TFS Power Tools are ready for download. Brian Harry has a good summary of the update here. The big visible changes are: 1. The ability to use the shell extensions against a TFS not on the same domain as your PC. You now get a credentials prompt. 2. Work Item Search!! The Work Item Tracking toolbar now contains a search box. I know my ......

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Microsoft has released an updated virtual machine for Visual Studio 2010 RTM including TFS, Microsoft Test Manager, all the bits. Also includes sample projects and hands on labs. The previous version expires June 1st, this one is good until November 1st, 2011. As usual Brian Keller has all the details including download instructions! Technorati Tags: ......

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If you have a lot of TFS build definitions for your projects, its been a bit of a hassle that there is no way to organize and manage them in Team Explorer other than a long flat list. Well, the good folks at Inmeta have released the Inmeta Build Explorer tool which displays build definitions in a hierarchy where names use a . notation to delineate the ......

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I was happy to receive this email today: Thanks to the great folks at Imaginet and Notion Solutions for all your help and support over the last year. Also, thanks to the MS Product group for being such a great team to engage with. Looking forward to continued interaction over the coming year. Technorati Tags: MVP,ALM ......

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Microsoft released a PILE of Visual Studio goodness today: Visual Studio 2010 SP1(Including TFS SP1) Finally done with remembering which GDR packs, KB Patches, etc need to be installed with a new VS/TFS 2010 deployment. Just grab the SP1. It’s available today for MSDN Subscribers and March 10th for public download. TFS-Project Server Integration Feature ......

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I had fun presenting “What’s new in Entity Framework 4” at the Winnipeg Code Camp today. I mentioned some resources on my deck that I thought I’d include here in my blog. •EF 4.0 Hands on Labs •EF CTP 5 (has the new DbContext and CodeFirst support) •MSDN Data Developer Center: MSDN.com/Data •ADO.NET Team Blog •EF Design Blog •How to choose an inheritance ......

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So, I’ve been attending the ALM Summit Conference this week on Microsoft Campus in Redmond. It was feeling a bit like “Intro to Agile” Conference as we got the 100 Level Agile overview at the start of almost every session. As a result I tweeted and included the #almsummit hastag Well, that started a lot of tweets from folks feeling the same way. They ......

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Notifications of subsequent publications with Errata fixes. Got an email this week from O’Reilly stating that an updated version of Julia Lerman’s Programming Entity Framework, Second Edition was available. How sweet is that? I love that I can carry around a decent sized library of books with me on my iPad. I use it almost exclusively as my reading ......

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There goes my weekend Technorati Tags: Visual Studio 2010,LightSwitch ......

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Microsoft just announced new Power Tool for TFS 2010 which greatly simplifies setting up backups and performing restores. Can’t wait for this new release. Brian Harry shares all the details on his blog post so I won’t get into all the details here. I will say, however, that this is another GREAT step from the TFS team at Microsoft to simplify the administration ......

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There is a proposed site for Team Foundation Server Q&A on Stack Exchange Area 51 that could use your help. We need more people to commit to using the site in order to get from Proposed status to full site. If you see value in having a Stack Exchange location dedicated to TFS Q&A, please go and Commit here: http://area51.stackexchange... ......

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